


Each Coming Night

by DrivenSnow



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canonical Character Death, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-10
Updated: 2014-01-10
Packaged: 2018-01-08 03:32:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1127844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DrivenSnow/pseuds/DrivenSnow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Will you say when I’m gone away,<br/>‘My lover came to me and we’d lay in rooms unfamiliar.’”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Each Coming Night

**Author's Note:**

> So.The title and the general outline (the 2 italicized lines before each section) are from "Each Coming Night" by Iron & Wine. They are an amazing group and I highly recommend each and every song they have out there.
> 
> I don't own the song or the movie Pacific Rim.

_Will you say when I’m gone away,_

_“My lover came to me and we’d lay_

_In rooms unfamiliar.”_

It had been 3 months. Three long months that just bled together and felt like one endless night. Raleigh hadn’t seen Mako (or anyone) in all that time and she had finally put her foot down. She’d allowed him to mourn and now she felt it was time for him to put himself back to together. Mako had found him (of course) and by the time she tracked him down in Chennai in the south of India, he had traveled across 3 continents and was exhausted. He was so tired of running away from the past and the memories but he had no idea how to live a life post kaiju, in a world post Chuck Hansen.

He was seated on the most comfortable couch in her living room and she was in the kitchen making him a cup of green tea. While she wasn’t in the room, he looked around at his surroundings and marveled that she had actually moved out of the Shatterdome and got her own place. He was so sure that she would stay but he was so proud that she had the courage to move on. She was still apart of the PPCD, basically Herc’s right hand in running it, but she felt it was time for her to separate her home from her work place.

She handed the tea to him and sat across from him and just waited. She wasn’t going to force him to talk if he didn’t want to right away. He sipped at the tea and busied himself with staring intently at the coffee table. Eventually his tea went cold and he had only drunk a quarter of it when he caved. He felt the all the words and memories that he had been pushing away for so long bubbling in his chest until they threatened to boil over. Mako could see the struggle on his face and crossed the room to place her hand on his arm. This seeminly tiny gesture was what finally enabled him to open his mouth and let everything he had been keeping inside him tumble out.

He told her about the first time, about how he had listened to Chuck’s footsteps (Chuck was not a stealthy person) pacing outside his door for 15 minuets before Raleigh decided to put him out of his misery and let him in before he could knock or ask. How they would find empty rooms in the ‘dome and just be. They weren’t rangers, Raleigh didn’t have a dead brother; Chuck wasn’t Herc Hansen’s son, they were just Raleigh and Chuck.

_Will you say to them, when I’m gone,_

_“I loved your son for his sturdy arms.”_

 

Two weeks after his break down in Mako’s living room, Raleigh found himself in Herc’s new (well, new to Raleigh) office in the Shatterdome. Herc elected to stay in Hong Kong and keep its Shatterdome as the PPDC headquarters. He didn’t want Stacker’s old office for the same reason he didn’t want to relocate HQ to Sydney. Too many memories he said. Every time he stepped into the former Marshal’s quarters, he could hear Stacker’s and Chuck’s last words to LOCCENT and to each other.

_“We can clear a path, for the lady.”_

_“My father always said, he said if you have the shot you take it. So let’s do this.”_

_“It was a pleasure sir.”_

Too much.

Raleigh sat facing Herc over his desk and they didn’t speak for a while. Raleigh was occupied trying to compose what he wanted to say and Herc was wondering if Chuck ever had the chance to experience what he had with Angela before he climbed into Striker for the last time. He knew Chuck and Raleigh were “involved” (no one knew how to label their relationship. They didn’t want to name what they had because they knew it had an expiration date). Herc didn’t want to pry into what Chuck got up to when they weren’t piloting.

Raleigh told him about the end. They had been “together” for about 7 months now and it was the night after the battle in Hong Kong. Pitfall was coming up in the next couple weeks, as soon as Mako and the other techs were able to make and finish repairs to Gipsy and Striker. They were in Raleigh’s room and really; they were trying to not show the other one how scared they both were. Eventually they talked and Raleigh tried to express the feelings he had while standing in LOCCENT and when it went completely dark and not know what was going on in the harbor. It was panic. Sheer, blind panic. He would never forget the feeling he had when he and Mako were being transported to the harbor in Gipsy and saw the tiny figures that were Herc and Chuck standing on the completely immobile Striker.

The next night they were in Raleigh’s room and they talked about the past. They didn’t give each other false hope, they knew one or both of them weren’t coming back from Pitfall and so they were brutally honest. They were inseparable for the next week while they waited for the inevitable. Chuck told Raleigh what it was like to lose his mother when he was 10 years old and not even know how she died. How bitter he felt and continued to be when he found out his father had chosen him over his mother and how he thought Herc abandoned him while he was growing up in favour of developing the Jaeger program.

In turn, Raleigh told Chuck all about growing up in Alaska, in the intense cold and how much he missed the snow, the ice fishing and the tobogganing. He talked about Yancy and for the second time since he died, Raleigh opened up about what it was like to have to have his brother’s consciousness ripped out of his head and how half his soul was lost that day.

_Will you say when I’m gone away,_

_“Your father’s body was judgment day.”_

 

4 years later, Raleigh Becket became a father. He held his son for the first time and cried. He brought Yancy Charles Becket, Yance for the most part, home on the day that would have been Chuck’s 26th birthday. They decided that Yance would share his birthday with the father he would never meet. He grew up on the stories told to him by Herc and Mako, both who were never far and whom Raleigh was so thankful for because he was completely crazy, thinking he would be able to raise a child on his own. On really bad days, days where he did every single thing he could think of to get the kid to stop crying, he would fantasize about the next time he saw Mako or Herc and what he would do to them for letting him think he could be a single dad.

They would tell Yance stories about the PPDC in its heyday. Herc would have his attention completely when he reminisced about growing up in Australia and his years in the air force. Mako would completely convert him into a Japanese food-loving creature that loved sushi so much Raleigh had to learn how to make it at home or suffer the consequences when they couldn’t find a sushi restaurant in Hong Kong that meet Yance’s standards. Raleigh was the one to tell him about the uncle he was named for and the father he had never met but knew so well because the stories about Chuck Hansen, pilot of the infamous Striker Eureka, or Papa as Yance called him, were Yance’s favourite. He would beg Raleigh for “one more story Daddy” every night, even after he had heard them all 4,5,6 times. Even as he got older he never tired of hearing about Chuck.

_Will you say to me when I’m gone_

_“Your face is faded but lingers on”_

 

Raleigh, Mako and Herc celebrated with Yance on his 22nd birthday with the thought of how he was the now the same age as Chuck when he died. It’s a heavy thought and they tried to carry it as best they could throughout the day.

Raleigh lied in bed that night and went to the place he’d been visiting every night for 26 years. That place where you’re not quite sleeping but you’re not awake either. He saw Chuck’s face, somewhat blurry now but still there, and he heard his voice, “Come on Ray. Make sure you tell him about that time you completely messed up your first drift with Mako.” which was so Chuck it hurt. But the thing Raleigh would cling onto, even as he passed through this place of sleep-awakeness to full on REM sleep and was still holding onto in the morning when he was shaking off the last of his grogginess, was Chuck calling him home.

_“I’ll be seeing you soon. Be good; don’t let our son get into too much trouble. I love you.”_

_‘Cause light strikes a deal with each coming night._


End file.
